Can one imagine how the media would pile on Trump if working-class white males in Trump T-shirts invaded a Hillary Clinton rally and shut it down?

REPUBLICAN WIMPS ABSOLVE THE RIOTERS

Friday evening’s Donald Trump rally in Chicago was broken up by a foul-mouthed mob that infiltrated the hall and forced the cancellation of the event to prevent violence and bloodshed.

Brownshirt tactics worked. The mob, triumphant, rejoiced.

And the reaction of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich?

All three Republican rivals blamed – Donald Trump.

With his “dangerous style of leadership,” Trump stokes this anger, mewed Rubio, “This is what happens when a leading presidential candidate goes around feeding into a narrative of bitterness and anger and frustration.”

Rubio implies that if Trump doesn’t tone down his remarks to pacify the rabble, he will be responsible for the violence visited upon him.

Kasich echoed Rubio: “Donald Trump has created a toxic environment (that) has allowed his supporters and those who sometimes seek confrontation to come together in violence.”

But were the thousands of Trump supporters who came out to cheer him that night really looking for a fight? Or were they exercising their right of peaceful assembly?

Cruz charged Trump with “creating an environment that only encourages this sort of nasty discord,” thus offering absolution to the mob.

Friday night cried out for moral clarity. What we got from Trump’s rivals was moral mush that called to mind JFK’s favorite quote from Dante: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.

As news outlets have reported, Friday’s disruption at the University of Illinois-Chicago auditorium was a preplanned assault.

Behind it were the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Hispanics hoisting Mexican flags and cop-haters carrying filthy signs to show their contempt for police.

People for Bernie, a pro-Sanders outfit, tweeted, “[This] wasn’t just luck. It took organizers from dozens of organizations and thousands of people to pull off. Great work.”

Now, Sanders did not order this assault on the civil rights of Trump supporters. But MoveOn.org has endorsed him, and “Bernie” signs and T-shirts were everywhere among the disrupters. Hence, he has a duty to disavow this conduct and those who engaged in it.

Can one imagine how the media would pile on Trump if working-class white males in Trump T-shirts invaded a Hillary Clinton rally and shut it down?

Can one imagine how the networks and cable TV channels that host town halls with the candidates would react if hell-raisers sneaked into their audiences and shouted obscenities during discussions?

The keening over the First Amendment would not cease for weeks.

Some of us have been here before and know how this ends.

When the urban riots broke out in the ’60s, Hubert Humphrey declared that, if he lived in a ghetto, “I could lead a pretty good riot myself.”

At his 1968 convention in Chicago, radicals baited and provoked the cops in the front of the Conrad Hilton, and as this writer watched, their patience exhausted after days of abuse, Chicago’s finest tore into the mob and delivered some street justice.

“Richard Nixon,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson, “is living in the White House today because of what happened that night in Chicago.”

Hunter got that one right.

That fall, Humphrey was daily assailed by the kinds of haters now disrupting Trump rallies. Everywhere he went, they chanted, “Dump the Hump!” At times, Humphrey came close to tears.

That fall, Humphrey realized the monster he helped nurture.

My tormentors, he said, are “not just hecklers, but highly disciplined, well-organized agitators … some of them are anarchists, and some of these groups are destroying the Democratic Party and destroying this country.”

In 1970, when President Nixon sent U.S. troops into Cambodia to clean out Viet Cong sanctuaries, and students rioted, Ronald Reagan called them “cowardly fascists,” and declared, “If there’s going to be a bloodbath, let it begin here.”

Not much Cruz-Rubio-Kasich equivocating there.

When radicals stomped down Wall Street desecrating Old Glory, construction workers came down from the building sites they were working and whaled on them.

Union president Peter J. Brennan was soon in the Oval Office – and in Nixon’s Cabinet. “Secretary Bunker,” we called him.

Prediction. Given their “victory” in Chicago, MoveOn.org and its allied nasties will try to replicate it, again and again. And as Americans came to despise the ’60s radicals, they will come to despise them.

And, as in the 1960s, the country will take a turn – to the right.

America has changed from the land we grew up in. But she is not yet ready to allow ugly mobs screaming obscenities at Trump and his folks inside and outside that hall in Chicago, or their paragons like socialist Bernie Sanders, to take over the country.

Those raising hell in the street in Chicago and that convention hall are unfit to be citizens of this democratic republic.

For as Edmund Burke reminded us, “Men of intemperate minds can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

71 comments:

The Left’s bullies cannot be allowed to hijack freedom of speech for an entire nation.

March 15, 2016

First the Left unleashed anti-war rallies against President Bush in support of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Then it brought out Occupy Wall Street to push the radical Marxist agenda that Bernie Sanders is now riding like a red wave through the Democratic Party. Finally, it unleashed the racist hate mobs that looted and burned neighborhoods and cities, singled out white people for harassment over the color of their skin, terrorized campuses and incited the murder of police officers.

The common agenda of all these hateful campaigns was to radicalize, intimidate and terrorize Americans into submitting to the totalitarians of the Left. From the inner city neighborhood to the Ivy League campus, from a couple having brunch in the morning to a police officer on patrol being shot in the head, from a political rally to the Thanksgiving Day parade, these thugs of the Left are out to enforce their tyrannical Party Line through political terror.

While the media call these so-called protesters “non-violent,” they completely ignore the fact that suppressing someone else's free speech is an act of intimidation. To prevent someone else from speaking is not a debate. It's the refusal to have a debate. Protesters have the right to be heard, but silencing views you disagree with is not a protest. It is the exercise of totalitarian power. And the Left’s organized efforts to prevent opposing points of view from being heard have now migrated from the campus to the city. The media call these crybullies the victims. But they are not victims. They are thugs who are using brute force to suppress the free speech and political freedoms of others.

Donald Trump has as much right to hold a rally as Bernie Sanders. His supporters have as much right to come out to hear him speak. The Left's refusal to accept this is a definitive rejection of freedom of speech and democracy.

For all his faults, Donald Trump is to be commended for standing up against all this, and for his cool under fire. When a leftist fascist attempted to attack him recently at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, and succeeded in grabbing his foot before he was subdued by Secret Service agents, Trump quipped: “I was ready for him but it’s much easier if the cops do it, don’t we agree?”

.Trump’s opponents, both Republican and Democrat, and the Obama administration should realize what’s at stake – if, that is, they have any interest in preserving the American tradition of non-violent political disagreement. The unseemly haste of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich to blame Trump’s rhetoric for the violent shutdown of his Chicago rally is extraordinarily disappointing: they should realize that the same violence can and will be turned against them if they stray too far from the thugs’ idea of what constitutes acceptable political discourse.

There is only one answer to a movement that is determined to thuggishly shut down the speech of others. And that is prison....

Reports are emerging of a likely Islamic terrorism attack on two members of the Canadian military late Monday afternoon.

According to the Toronto Sun, the attacker may have uttered the phrase “Praise Allah”:

A brazen knife attack that sent two Canadian soldiers to hospital was disturbing enough, but police sources say it was the attacker uttering the word “Allah” that prompted Toronto Police to call in terror experts ...

“He appears to be of Middle Eastern decent and was presenting himself as if he is Muslim, but it is so early in the investigation and all of that needs to be confirmed,” said a police source.

[Police Chief Mark] Saunders said a man armed with a knife entered the building around 3:30 p.m. and injured a Forces member. Other employees in uniform subdued the man, but a second Forces member was injured in the process.

Additional reporting by the CBC indicates the man walked into the recruitment centre, pulled out a knife and attacked the person behind the counter, and then attempted to move farther into the building, but was taken down by a group of between six and eight soldiers.

Canada's Integrated National Security Enforcement Team has been called in to investigate the possible act of terrorism, and contact has been made with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

The potential terrorist attack comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other members of his Liberal government assured Canadians that there was negligible risk of Islamic terrorism in the nation and then embarked on a massive immigration program from Muslim-dominated countries. In recent months, more than 25,000 Syrian refugees were resettled in Canada.

Now, O'bumble must go to other countries to try to make points about America.

Here's something a little closer to home...

A man charged with killing six people in a series of shootings in southwestern Michigan interspersed with stints as an Uber driver told investigators he was being controlled by the ride-hailing app through his cellphone, police said Monday.

According to a police report, Jason Dalton, 45, told authorities, “it feels like it is coming from the phone itself” and he didn’t know how to describe that. He also described something “like an artificial presence,” the report said...

It would be a thing of beauty. Mexico controls it's southern border very tightly. We should too.**********

March 15, 2016

Hillary declares the 4 dead at Benghazi compound non-persons

By Thomas Lifson

For the second presidential debate in a row, Hillary Clinton has gravely insulted the memory and the families of the four brave American hung out to dry at the Benghazi compound dead after waiting in vain for air support as they defended a diplomatic facility under her supervision.

Fox News reports:

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton committed her second gaffe in as many days on the campaign trail Monday night, claiming that the U.S. "didn't lose a single person" in Libya during her time as secretary of state.

Sorry, Fox, it’s not a gaffe, it’s a tell. To Hillary Clinton, the four male officials and warriors don’t matter at all. They are at best an inconvenience. If they were alive, they would have to be dealt with, but because they are dead, they can be forgotten, rendered unworthy of memory.

This has been the pattern of Hillary and her husband throughout their lives. Don’t take it from me, take from her business partner and (former) friend from her early days in Arkansas, Jim McDougall. Jim and his wife Susan became partners with Hillary in the Whitewater real estate development scheme, intended to allow the Clintons to get richer than Bill’s low state government salary and Hillary’s law practice would allow would allow. It was a scam, of course, but Jim took the fall, and died in prison. Before his death, he told NBC (in words that should never be forgotten by anyone contemplating a Rodham presidency, “the Clintons are really sort of like tornadoes moving through people's lives. I'm just one of the people left in the wake of their passing by, but I have no whining or complaining to do, because I have lots of company.''

eh? Where's the bullshit? Are you disputing the facts? His conclusion? It seems pretty straight forward - If Trump supporters caused grief at Clinton or Sanders rallies many in the 'media' would object just as many in the 'media' are objecting to Sanders supporters causing grief at Trump rallies. I think it simplistic to assign markers maligning Sanders to the protestors but calling Bullshit on the entire piece requires some supporting rationale.

Fast-forward to today and we see the media priming the public to try to kill Trump, or at least create some photogenic mayhem at a public event. Again, no one is sitting in a room plotting Trump’s death, but – let’s be honest – at least half of the media believes Trump is the next Hitler, and a Hitler assassination would be morally justified. Also great for ratings. The media would not be charged with any crime for triggering some nut to act. There would be no smoking gun. No guilt. No repercussions. Just better ratings and bonuses all around.

"In the 2D world of reason, no one in the media consciously wants a candidate for president to be injured, and no one is consciously acting in a way that would make it happen. But in the 3D world of persuasion, society has decided to lance the wart that is Trump. Collectively – the media, the public, and the other candidates – are creating a situation that is deeply dangerous for Trump."

The larger-than-life story of Heisman Trophy-winning Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel is a roller-coaster ride that defies belief — until you get to know the rest of the Manziel family.Years before Johnny Football, there was the Syrian Kid, an oil fortune and family members accused of crimes.Manziel's great-grandfather, Bobby Joe Manziel, was a bantamweight boxer born in Lebanon who sparred and became friends with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.RELATED: Manziel's ex-girlfriend says he repeatedly struck her during fightManziel retired from boxing and moved to East Texas in the 1930s to try his luck in the oil fields as a wildcatter. Almost broke, Manziel asked Dempsey for $400 to drill for oil on the grounds of the Negro New Hope Baptist Church in Gladewater.The well was a gusher. Dempsey later said that $400 gamble was the smartest investment he ever made.Like most East Texas oil barons at the time, Bobby Joe Manziel settled down in Tyler, where the family became a household name long before the rest of Texas heard of Johnny Football.“It's a fascinating family,” said Sam Kidd, treasurer and office manager of the Smith County Historical Society in Tyler. “There are probably more legends about the Manziels than there are actual things in writing.”

Just read the Buchanan piece. Normally, I can agree with the majority of what Pat writes. This piece was total garbage.

in response

AshTue Mar 15, 08:41:00 PM EDT

eh? [editorial note: you've been in Canada too long} Where's the bullshit? Are you disputing the facts...

I'm disputing his views.

Is he right in criticizing Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich. Yes, but not for what they said but for the reason they said it. Their comments were all pure politics, what you should expect from politicians especially politicians that are losing. All politicians are dicks even the ones who don't have one. Grow up, Pat, what did you expect?

But as for what they said. Has Trump created a 'toxic environment'? Of course. An environment that 'encourages this sort of nasty discord'. Of course, what have we been talking about for since the debates began. One minute he is telling his people 'let the police handle it' the next he is saying 'if you see someone with a tomato knock them out'.

Did this justify the Dem protesters disrupting and forcing Trump to cancel and deprive his supporters of hearing him? Of course not, but then has the 1st Amendment ever meant anything to left wing libs other than as a legal cover? Unfortunately, since it was a public building those same left wing demonstrators have a legal right to be there. Lesson learned for Trump, start holding all your rallies in private venues.

Pat may be right about the media but only to a certain extent. They will write about whatever gets them the most ratings. Every politician worth his salt knows that. And how in the hell can Trump of all people complain about press coverage. He's received more free publicity and air time than all the other candidates combined.

However, it's Buchanan's implied lionizing of brutal responses to demonstrators and the examples he uses I find disgusting, Chicago police busting the heads in what the Walker Report referred to as a 'police riot', Reagan calling for a bloodbath against war protesters, construction workers pounding on demonstrators on Wall Street. Sweet. Also, consistent.

Those raising hell in the street in Chicago and that convention hall are unfit to be citizens of this democratic republic.

Who the hell is Buchanan to proclaim who can and can't be a citizen in this country?

...He suggested that Nixon label Democratic opponent George McGovern an extremist and burn the White House tapes.[12]

Buchanan remained as a special assistant to Nixon through the final days of the Watergate scandal. He was not accused of wrongdoing, though some mistakenly suspected him of being Deep Throat. When the actual identity of the press leak was revealed as Federal Bureau of Investigation Associate Director Mark Felt in 2005, Buchanan called him "sneaky," "dishonest" and "criminal."[14]

Because of his role in the Nixon campaign's "attack group," Buchanan appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee on September 26, 1973. He told the panel:

"The mandate that the American people gave to this president and his administration cannot, and will not, be frustrated or repealed or overthrown as a consequence of the incumbent tragedy."[12]

When Nixon resigned in 1974, Buchanan briefly stayed on as special assistant under incoming President Gerald Ford. Chief of Staff Alexander Haig approved Buchanan's appointment as ambassador to South Africa, but Ford refused it.[12]

Buchanan remarked about Watergate:

"The lost opportunity to move against the political forces frustrating the expressed national will.... To effect a political counterrevolution in the capital —... there is no substitute for a principled and dedicated man of the Right in the Oval Office."[12]

Please. Family members don't qualify as appeals to authority since you can't provide a supporting link. As I recall, you refused to bring her on here to respond for your sins.

As for the two parties involved. The cowboy, McGraw, before being arrested said he was glad he did it and 'the next time we may have to kill him', he also said 'he could have been a terrorist' or with 'ISIS'. McGraw continued 'he wasn't acting like an American'. Pat Buchanan's kind of guy.

The sucker-punchee, Jones, on hearing that said 'Well bless his heart'. Of course, Rufus can tell us what the phrase actually means in the South.

Still, one has to ask which of these two is the more peaceful assembler.

"As I recall, you refused to bring her on here to respond for your sins."

I don't recall a thing about such an alleged incident.

I may have said, though, that, out of concern for you, wishing to leave you with a shred of dignity at least, as I always strive to do, I refused to bring her on here to confront you concerning your contniual sinning.

Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Robert Spencer in FrontPage: Progressive Brownshirts

March 15, 2016 5:19 am By Robert Spencer 33 Comments

In FrontPage today I discuss how Leftist protesters are making violence and intimidation a regular feature of the American public discourse.

Ferguson. Baltimore. Chicago. Everywhere Leftist protesters occupy the streets, those whose opinions are deemed insufficiently progressive are abused, mocked, ridiculed, brutalized and physically menaced. This lawlessness is rapidly becoming the norm; the Obama administration, as well as leading media and cultural figures, need to decry that normalization and act strongly against these thugs now – before the American public square is transformed beyond recognition, and ceases to be an arena for free discourse.

Although this violence and brutalization of political opponents is a new phenomenon in American politics, it has a historical antecedent: the Nazi Brownshirts. In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.”

To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking one’s life into one’s hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful).

That is just the kind of public arena that the Left has been trying to bring to the United States for years. For decades, they have told us that their political and ideological opponents are not just wrong, but malevolent. In college in the early 1980s, I was taken aback by the obscene, relentless, vicious hatred that the Left directed toward Ronald Reagan – I was at that time entirely sympathetic with their disdain for him, but the frenzy with which they expressed it, their wild furious contempt, shocked me.

And that was nothing compared to what they had in store for George W. Bush. Years ago, the Democratic Party as a whole, along with the entire Leftist establishment, adopted the Alinskyite tactic of ridiculing, mocking and smearing their foes instead of engaging them on the level of ideas.

(ed. comment: If totalitarianism comes to the USA it will come from the left, not the right)

The shutdown of Trump’s rally in Chicago, however, takes this one step farther. Trump supporters leaving the arena in Chicago after the Left-fascists had forced cancellation of the Trump rally last Friday experienced that firsthand. AP reported that “the protesters closed in on the building, obstructing most of the exits just as Trump supporters began filing out. The Trump supporters had little choice but to push through the anti-Trump crowds that parted only slightly, yelling, ‘Racists go home!’…Trump supporter Bill Vail said he walked through a gauntlet of protesters who cursed at him as he pushed through holding his 9-year-old daughter’s hand. She cried, he said.”

Commented Vail: “They scream about tolerance, but are being intolerant themselves. That doesn’t make sense.” Yes, it does. Clearly the authoritarian, America-hating Left has decided that the Brownshirts had a good idea: those whose dare to oppose their political views will henceforth be greeted with truncheon and fist. Soon the dissenters will learn their lesson, and accept the Left’s agenda with docility.

Cruz, Rubio and Kasich are already learning to do this, as they demonstrated when they had the audacity, or craven opportunism, to claim that Trump’s rhetoric was at least partially responsible for the shutdown of the Chicago rally. Do they think they will be spared? Do they realize that by charging that Trump bears partial responsibility for the thugs’ actions, they have tacitly validated those actions, implying that under some circumstances, the forcible shutdown of one’s political opponents was acceptable – if, say, that political opponent was prone to saying “outrageous” things?

They don’t realize that once that premise has been accepted, it can be turned on them. And it will be. Now that they’ve apparently agreed that violent thugs can be justified in forcibly silencing those they hate, what will they possibly say when the thugs decide that they, too, have strayed beyond the bounds of what one is allowed to say?

Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich – to say nothing of Clinton, Sanders, and Obama – should have forcefully and unequivocally condemned the Chicago thugs, called for their arrest, and declared their unshakeable support for civility in the public discourse and respect for one’s ideological opponents. Instead, they all contributed to the erosion of that civility and respect, and took the U.S. just a bit closer to becoming a tyranny in which the goons who shut down politically unacceptable rallies work for the state.

Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels, if they’re able to look on from their fiery graves, may be feeling a sense of having, at long last, triumphed.

“According to an obscure ruling in Islamic law, cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he enslaves is free of child before having intercourse with her.” — from this New York Times article, March 12, 2016

Islamic State sex slave

Possibly the most horrifying of the Islamic State’s practices has been the systematic sexual enslavement of Yazidi women by and for its fighters. Since August 2014, thousands of Yazidi girls and women have been taken from their families, warehoused, and put on display in viewing rooms where they are inspected by potential buyers among the Muslims. Having examined the goods, these fighters make their choice and then sign a sales contract for these girls, who have now become their property that they are allowed to do with as they wish, including using them for sexual gratification, and then to resell them to others.

The IS fighters have been taught that because these Yazidi girls practice a religion other than Islam, and one without the minimal protections afforded to those who are fellow People of the Book (ahl al-kitab) with a written scripture, that is Christians and Jews, Muslim men have not only a right, but a positive religious duty to rape them.

From an August 2015 New York Times report:

“In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her—it condoned and encouraged it.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion…. ‘ I kept telling him it hurts – please stop. Drawing closer to God.”

Other girls testified to the same treatment, mixing sex and acts of devotion: “Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray. He kept telling me this is ibadah,” a term from Islamic scripture meaning “worship.” He said that raping me is his prayer to God. It’s allowed. It’s halal.

What non-Muslims may find most disturbing is how these IS fighters, capable of the repeated rape of helpless schoolgirls, and of every other conceivable kind of cruelty toward non-Muslim men as well as women, unperturbedly violate by their behavior everything we regard as humanly decent, yet are terribly worried about only one thing: breaking even a single one of the many Islamic regulations of life, whatever its content. And when it comes to the rules regulating sexual slavery, they appear to worry most about the duty a Muslim man has to make sure that before having intercourse with one of his slave women, she not be pregnant. The origin of the rule is disputed, but most likely it once had to do with ensuring that a slave girl could both continue to work and to provide sexual gratification – hence the recommendation to her owner to practice al-azl, or coitus interruptus. But once the rule is set in stone, its origins do not matter.

IS buyers of slave girls demand assurances that the girls not be pregnant, and once they’ve bought a slave-girl, these serial rapists insist on feeding their girls contraceptives of every variety, that is, they keep them in re-sellable condition.One Yazidi girl recalled that “when prospective buyers came to inquire about her, she overheard them asking for assurances that she was not pregnant, and her owner provided a box of birth control as proof.” In other examples, would-be rapists first quizzed their victims on their last menstrual cycle, or insisted that their sex slaves take a morning-after pill, or when available, gave them a dose of an injectable contraceptive, Depo-Provera. In a particularly grim case of Mother Knows Best, one Yazidi girl, known only as J., recalled that when she was sold to a new owner, “it was the man’s mother who escorted her to the hospital. ‘She told me, ‘If you are pregnant we are going to send you back.’ About 30 or 40 minutes later they came back to say I wasn’t pregnant.” The fighter’s mother triumphantly told her son that the 18-year-old was not pregnant, validating his right to rape her, which he did repeatedly.”

What all this testing for pregnancies, these contraceptives of every variety, these worries on the part of IS rapists, offers is insight into the way Muslims enslave themselves to the complex of rules regulating every area of Muslim life, including that of sexual slavery. If the rule exists, it must unswervingly be followed. If something is prescribed as halal or proscribed as haram, there need be no further discussion. No independent judgment as to its morality enters into it.

The New York Times reporter on IS calls this rule about pregnancy and unsuitability for rape a “medieval injunction”: “[a]ccording to an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the Islamic State, a man must ensure that the woman he buys is free of child before having intercourse with her.” To prove she is not pregnant, the slave must complete her “waiting period” – that is, must pass one menstrual period.

But this is not a “medieval injunction.” It derives from various Hadith, including this Hadith of Abu Dawud in the 9th century:

Abu Said al-Khudri said: “The apostle of Allah sent a military expedition to Awtas on the occasion of the battle of Hunain. They met their enemy and fought with them. They defeated them and took them captives. Some of the Companions of the apostle of Allah were reluctant to have intercourse with the female captives in the presence of their husbands who were unbelievers. So Allah, the Exalted, sent down the Quranic verse, “And all married women (are forbidden) unto you save those (captives) whom your right hands possess”. That is to say, they are lawful for them when they complete their waiting period.” [The Quran verse is 4:24]. (Sunan Abu Dawud vol. 2, no. 2150).

The note on this Hadith says that “After the distribution of the spoils of war a man may have intercourse with the female slave after passing one menstrual period, if she is not pregnant. If she is pregnant one should wait till she delivers the child.”

The Times reporter could have used the subject of sexual slavery and birth control to describe and explain the varying degrees of authority in Islam, with the Qur’an coming first, the Hadith second, the Sira third, in importance. She might have discussed what Hadith scholars or muhaddithin took into account – the isnad-chain — in assigning rank of “authenticity” to individual Hadith, and might then also have explained how Believers assigned a rank of “authoritativeness” to the collections of Hadith by various muhaddithin (with Bukhari and Muslim considered to be most “authoritative”). Then she could have talked about the Hadith-derived rules for Muslim slaveowners.

But more importantly, she might have held up for closer inspection the way True Believers observe the rules that regulate every aspect of a Muslim’s life, completely without concern for their moral content. All of these rapists who insist on “doing the right thing” Islamically, which means providing contraceptives to their victims to ensure that they can’t get pregnant during the time that they are being raped, all those Muslim mothers delighted to discover that their son’s chosen sex slave is not presently pregnant, thereby “validating his right to rape her,” all those Muslim rapists declaring that they are by their actions fulfilling a duty of ibadah or worship – these are the ingredients of the moral upside-down-cake of Muslim theology, and not only when it comes to sexual slavery.

They may behead every other day a baker’s dozen of Christians, they may burn bound prisoners alive, they may bomb churches and kill Yazidis and slit the throats of Shia to their hearts’ content, but don’t accuse the IS members of breaking an Islamic rule about not raping pregnant women. They have standards. They listen to a higher authority.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.